Amidst war and terror, are the 'better angels of our nature' on show?

Updated
August 29, 2014 19:07:00

2014 has been an awful year for news: the disappearance of one Malaysian plane, the shooting down of another, the looming possible war between Russia and Ukraine, the rise of the fanatical, merciless so-called Islamic State, and the spread of ebola have just been part of an almost uninterrupted diet of news media misery. You could be forgiven for thinking that things have never been worse. But one of the world's foremost thinkers wants you to challenge that thought.

MARK COLVIN: 2014 has been an awful year for news. The disappearance of one Malaysian plane, the shooting down of another, the looming possible war between Russia and Ukraine, the rise of the genocidal, fanatical, merciless so-called Islamic State and the spread of ebola have just been part of an almost uninterrupted diet of news media misery. You could be forgiven for thinking that things have never been worse.

But one of the world's foremost thinkers wants you to challenge that thought. Professor Steven Pinker of Harvard is an experimental psychologist, but his most recent book ranges over world history, archaeology, evolutionary biology, philosophy and much more. It's called The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes.

He's speaking at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney on Sunday.

In the course of a long talk about some of humanity's worst aspects, I asked Professor Pinker about that phrase: ''The Better Angels of Our Nature".

STEVEN PINKER: Well, they're not the only angels of our nature, unfortunately. So we have better angels and the reason that I chose that as the title for my book, lifting a phrase from Abraham Lincoln, is that it correctly alludes to the fact that human nature is complex. There isn't any answer to the question: are humans basically empathic, altruistic, generous or stingy, sadistic, aggressive. We're both.

MARK COLVIN: It almost calls up those old cartoons where you've got the little angel on one shoulder and the little red devil on the other.

STEVEN PINKER: It's exactly right and I think there's a lot of psychological truth to that. And of course, Sigmund Freud, with his superego and the id, alluded to the same idea.

So human nature is complex and in the book I list what I think of as our better angels versus our inner demons. I think there is more than one of each. It's not - there aren't hundreds of them. I think they can each be counted on the fingers of one hand, but they are separate.

So I think we have, on the dark side, we have just the ability to turn off our empathy and exploit another person if we consider them outside of our circle of kin and allies. We can dehumanise other people and just exploit them. We also have an urge for dominance, to climb the pecking order. We have a thirst for revenge. If someone harms us, we not only think that it's admissible to harm them in return, we think it's mandatory. We can't let people get away with harm-doing.

MARK COLVIN: But a lot of the thrust of the book is that the world is getting better in this regard, that the world is getting less violent.

STEVEN PINKER: That is right.

MARK COLVIN: And people are very surprised by that.

STEVEN PINKER: They're very surprised by that.

MARK COLVIN: How do you justify it?

STEVEN PINKER: There are two parts to that question. One is: what are the facts?, and the other is: how do you explain the facts? I'll start with the second part first, how do you explain the facts because that's what...

MARK COLVIN: No, no, go for the facts first.

STEVEN PINKER: Okay, facts first. If you plot objectively tallied rates of violence over time, the curves all point downward. And this is true of one-on-one homicides. This is true of forms of institutionalised violence, such as the use of torture as a form of criminal punishment.

MARK COLVIN: And the kind of evidence that you have here is archaeological. You've got skulls of people who've had their heads bashed in 2,000 years ago.

STEVEN PINKER: Yes, it depends on what time-scale we're talking about. For the last few hundred years in parts of the world like Europe that have records, we don't have to go to the bones, we can go to the parish archives.

For periods before there were written records, then you've got to do CSI (crime scene investigation), you've got to do forensic archaeology. And that too shows that traditional tribal cultures were by and large more violent on a per capita basis than even the most war-like modern societies.

MARK COLVIN: Okay. So, now to the why? I personally witnessed the results of the Rwanda massacres, where probably 800,000, 900,000 people were chopped to death at close range with machetes. How can our society be getting better when you compare that with, say, the medieval wars of religion. I mean, surely it's the same thing?

STEVEN PINKER: Well, no, because if you - all that shows is that violence hasn't gone to zero. Just picking out a violent place and time because it was violent doesn't tell you anything about the overall global rate of violence because what you aren't doing is picking out all the parts of the world that didn't have genocides and comparing the ratio. So if you...

MARK COLVIN: It is a difficult time at the moment, isn't it, to argue this case, particularly as, for instance, Christians and Yazidis who've lived in northern Iraq for thousands of years are being wiped out? It's very hard to tell people things are actually getting better.

STEVEN PINKER: It's hard - well, if you're saying things are getting better this month as opposed to three months ago, then, yes, but if you're saying this year as opposed to 50 years ago or 100 years ago or 1,000 years ago, then that's a different story.

And the decline of violence is not a perfectly smooth line. There are - it's a jagged sawtooth, but one that is inclined downward. And there are local reversals. If you go to particular parts of the world that you've selected because they're violent, then you find that, yeah, they're more violent than they were a year ago.

MARK COLVIN: So to some extent, the questions I'm asking you are a sort of variant of the old Groucho line, "Who are you going to believe: me or your own eyes?"

STEVEN PINKER: Well, no, it's, who you going to believe: the data for the world as whole or the parts that you cherry pick because they're violent? And you're saying look at this part of the world that I'm calling to your attention because it's violent. Is it violent? Well, yeah, it's violent. You wouldn't have asked me about it if it wasn't violent. It gives you a completely misleading picture if you single out the episodes rather than looking at the world as a whole.

And if I say to you: well, what about Sri Lanka? They had a really vicious civil war that ended a couple of years ago and it hasn't reignited. Look at Ethiopia versus Eritrea - they had a nasty war that killed 100,000 people. The world has forgotten about it and you don't have people going back to Eritrea because there isn't an international war there now.

So it's only when you do a survey of the world as whole that you have any idea whether the trends are going up, down or staying put. If you simply say, well, look at this morning's headlines, then of course the headlines are about the parts of the world that are still violent.

MARK COLVIN: But why do you think that, given that you've got the figures that show that trend is existing, why do you think that it will continue? Let me, for instance, say that Europe - for the last 40, 50 years people have been saying Europe's at peace and that's an enormous improvement on the last several hundred, probably thousand years.

But now the people are talking about possible breakup of Europe and things are happening in Ukraine and so on. Why do we think that this progress will continue and we can't slip back down into the pit?

STEVEN PINKER: Well we could. I don't think it's particularly likely in Europe. We see there are provocations such as in Crimea and eastern Ukraine that are comparable to ones that set off World War I, for example. And the chance that, say, the United States and western Europe will go to war against Russia to prevent it from swallowing Donetsk are very close to zero. There's not even talk about that from the most hawkish of the American hawks. That's just off the table as an option.

The - so there's that: that fact that if you look at the set of live options in the minds of the people in power, major war is just not a consideration.

Also, the predictions, when people started noticing that Europe and large parts of the world were getting more peaceful, that wasn't that they noticed - capitalised on a temporary dip which very quickly reversed itself, because that's kind of a statistical fallacy. You just say, well, looks good so far, maybe you just picked the moment at which all the cards fell into place.

These predictions were starting to be made in the 1980s, where people said, hey, Europe has gone for 40 years without a major war. Is that significant or not? Well, since - it's been 30 years and so the streak has extended. And so the factors that people pointed to in the '80s clearly were not a fluke. They really held firm. And that is true of many parts of the world where people started noticing the trend decades ago and they have continued.

MARK COLVIN: Professor Steven Pinker of Harvard. His book is called The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes. The full interview will be available on our website from this evening.